Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump and the inspector-general purge: Why this is so dangerous

Never let it be said that the Trump administration can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Even as the president's minions work overtime to botch every single aspect of the federal response to the COVID-19 crisis and prepare to cover up the number of cases and the number of deaths in order to make his "numbers" look good, they still manage to find the time to complete the purge of Trump critics within the government and destroy all mechanisms for accountability.

Trump's forces have pretty much rendered the Congress impotent, going so far as to argue before the Supreme Court last week that not only should a sitting president be immune from any and all investigation and prosecution, he's also immune from congressional oversight. It's well within the realm of possibility that the right-wing majority on the court will see it their way — at least when it comes to Republican presidents. (I wouldn't expect them to feel bound by their own precedents when it applies to Democrats. )

On Friday night, the administration announced the fourth firing in six weeks of an inspector general, State Department IG Steve Linick, in what the Washington Post has dubbed a "slow-motion Friday Night Massacre."

Back on April 3, Trump fired intelligence community IG Michael Atkinson, in retaliation for his having done his job by passing on a whistleblower's complaint to Congress about the president's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That seems like another era of history now, but it did indeed lead to Trump's impeachment. A week later he removed acting Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, who had been tasked with overseeing the $2 trillion pandemic relief fund. He was replaced with a Trump loyalist.